


Mass Effect Ficlets

by Forlorn_Melody



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Destroy Ending, Earthborn, Ficlets, Gen, Sole Survivor, headcanons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:46:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24208423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Forlorn_Melody/pseuds/Forlorn_Melody
Summary: A collection of my Mass Effect ficlets that don't have a ship referenced in them. Some feature my OC's, but it's not necessary to read their other fics to know what's going on.
Kudos: 1





	Mass Effect Ficlets

On good nights, she heads back to the Red’s headquarters with the other Johns and Janes, with canisters full of eezo and grins full of exhaustion. On bad nights, she knows better to return to Greenie with only a partial fill, so instead she visits the drop in shelter at St. Paul’s. The priests offer hot food and soft beds, and sometimes it almost feels like home. But she knows there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. **  
**

“I’m Father Timothy.” The priest sits down across the folding table from her, his voice dampened by the din of the fellowship hall. “What’s your name?” He pushes a plate with chocolate chip cookies toward her.

She eyes him, nabbing a cookie before he can take them away. “Jane,” she says with her mouth full of food.

“Jane,” Father Timothy frowns before he can catch himself, “I see.” He replaces his frown with a smile, biting into his own cookie. The priest swallows his bite before asking his next question. “What do you think about God, Jane?”

Ah. There it is. There’s the catch. “The guy upstairs? Greenie’s told me all about him. How he’s gonna send me straight to hell if I’m stupid enough to die.”

The priest’s eyes widen, and the last bite of his cookie falls from his fingers. Father Timothy then tells her a different story about The Guy Upstairs. For a while, Jane lets herself believe it. It’s nice to believe that as long as she keeps asking, The Guy Upstairs will eventually take her away from the streets and give her a real family–one that won’t steal her stuff from under her pillow or beat her when she doesn’t bring back her daily quota. So every night before she falls asleep, Jane mouths a request to The Guy Upstairs to send her a real family, but he never does.

And so Shepard enlists in the Alliance Navy the moment she’s passable for eighteen. The Alliance gives her a sort-of family–the kind that wakes her up in the middle of the night for drills and makes her do pushups if she runs her mouth (which she does a lot.) But at least Shepard knows their expectations, and they won’t leave her to die if she fucks up. These days her requests to the Guy Upstairs have more to do with getting her ass through the next drill, and the next, and then through each of her squad’s assigned missions.

Shepard stops believing in God the night her unit sets up camp in Akuze. A loving god wouldn’t have let fifty good men and women get crushed and/or melted by space worms. A loving god wouldn’t allow her to face the thresher maws alone, surrounded by the corpses of her brothers and sisters. He wouldn’t make her trudge to the LZ ten clicks away so no other unit made the same fucking mistake.

After Akuze, Shepard believes in one thing and one thing only: bringing order to chaos. This philosophy serves her well as a person, even better as a soldier, for years, until the day Shepard comes face to face with a holographic projection of a dead kid.

The dead kid offers Shepard exactly that–two different means of bringing order to the chaos of the war between synthetics and organics. But to alter their DNA and their programming, or to wield the Reapers and their constructs over them like some trigger-happy commander in chief? This isn’t the order Shepard had come to believe in. This isn’t the order she fought to protect.

So Shepard raises her pistol, and becomes an instrument of chaos.


End file.
